Vehicle health monitoring systems are often used to monitor various health characteristics of vehicles. Such operational health characteristics of the vehicles are further decomposed to the health characteristics of its major operational systems and subsystems. For example, when a vehicle is not currently in use, a health monitoring system may obtain and assemble data regarding prior operation of the vehicle, along with other data, in order to provide support for an operator or other individual for use in making decisions regarding future maintenance, operation, or use of the vehicle system, and/or for use in making other decisions. The same operational data is stored in databases for use in monitoring the operational reliability and maintenance history of the vehicle subsystems and usually feedback to OEM engineering for use in improving the reliability of the vehicle systems design. However, such health monitoring systems often have a support system or architecture that was developed on an ad hoc basis Such architectures may not provide optimal and streamlined support for diagnostics and prognostics pertaining to the vehicle that a hierarchal architecture discussed here would provide.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a vehicle health monitoring system having an improved support structure or architecture and connected to the reliability and maintenance databases. It is further desirable to provide program products for vehicle health monitoring program products with an improved support structure or architecture. It is also desirable to provide computer systems for vehicle health monitoring system having programs with an improved support structure or architecture. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying Appendix and this background of the invention.
Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying Appendix and this background of the invention.